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Featured in Development

Alex Bradbury gives an overview of the status and development of RISC-V as it relates to modern operating systems, highlighting major research strands, controversies, and opportunities to get involved.

Featured in Architecture & Design

Will Jones talks about how Habito, the leading digital mortgage broker, benefited from using Haskell, some of the wins and trade-offs that have brought it to where it is today and where it's going next. He also talks about why functional programming is beneficial for large projects, and how it helps especially with migrating the data store.

Featured in AI, ML & Data Engineering

Katharine Jarmul discusses research related to fair-and-private ML algorithms and privacy-preserving models, showing that caring about privacy can help ensure a better model overall and support ethics.

Featured in Culture & Methods

This personal experience report shows that political in-house games and bad corporate culture are not only annoying and a waste of time, but also harm a lot of initiatives for improvement. Whenever we become aware of the blame game, we should address it! DevOps wants to deliver high quality. The willingness to make things better - products, processes, collaboration, and more - is vital.

Featured in DevOps

Service mesh architectures enable a control and observability loop. At the moment, service mesh implementations vary in regard to API and technology, and this shows no signs of slowing down. Building on top of volatile APIs can be hazardous. Here we suggest to use a simplified, workflow-friendly API to shield organization platform code from specific service-mesh implementation details.

The Encrypted Media Extensions specification remains a better alternative for users than other platforms, including for reasons of security, privacy, and accessibility, by taking advantage of the Web platform. While additional work in some areas may be beneficial for the future of the Web Platform, it remains appropriate for the W3C to make the EME specification a W3C Recommendation.

EME is designed to allow browsers to play DRM content using the native HTML5 video element. EME works alongside a Content Decryption Module (CDM) that is the focus of the debate. By necessity, this CDM is closed-source, proprietary software, a fact that some consider anathema to the open web.

In 2014, Mozilla wrote that "the W3C EME specification only describes the JavaScript APIs to access the CDM. The CDM itself is proprietary and is not specified in detail in the EME specification."

In 2013, when they heard the W3C was taking up DRM, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) became a full member of the group specifically to "challenge DRM in the group's future work". After Berners-Lee wrote his decision, the EFF formally appealed that decision saying that a compromise related to the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act and Canada's Copyright Modernization Act was necessary to protect certain parties such as security researchers from prosecution.

On the face of it, the decision comes down to formalizing DRM into a W3C specification vs. requiring consumers to use plug-ins to view the content they want. From a practical perspective, mainstream browsers such as Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari, and Opera already support EME. Consumers won't see any changes and can continue using media services such as Netflix without the need for a specialized plug-in.

Netflix, for example, is never going to serve video without DRM. Or perhaps better put, movie and TV studios wouldn’t allow Netflix to do that. Nor would professional sports leagues or the Olympics. So either you can watch Netflix in a web browser or you can’t. If your web browser doesn’t support DRM natively, then you have to use plugins.

After publication of the recommendation, the EFF resigned from the W3C. Doctorow wrote that the EFF had "agreed to stand down regarding the EME standard, provided that the W3C extends its existing IPR policies to deter members from using DRM laws in connection with the EME". This appeal was not adopted and, according to a back-and-forth on Twitter, the W3C said that the "appeal decision was a majority vote by only members whether they wanted to proceed or not". 58.4% of members voted to proceed.